Chapter #7At Home by: Seuzz   "You're right, sir," you say. "We don't know that Joe and Frank are involved. There are lots of suspects. If Hal were here, he'd finger Fane." That draws a small smile from Charles. "There are many we don't know about. If I knew what this Calice de Tenebres was-- But that's not my business."
"It's a kind of pump," Charles says after a moment's silence. "It extracts the essentia from the victim, leaving nothing behind."
You fold your hands thoughtfully. "And once you have someone's essentia, what would you do with it?"
"There are many diabolical things that might be done with it," Charles says simply. "But if the thief knows about the Calice, and what it can do, that suggests we're dealing with a very knowledgeable adept."
"That doesn't rule out Joe," you say. "It doesn't rule out Fane, either."
Charles seems to expect you to say something further.
"I'd prefer to hang fire on this one, sir," you say. "Unless you have another assignment for me, I can linger, let Rick or someone else chase the leads, and come in later if it seems like a good idea."
Charles nods. There's some further discussion of how Rick will conduct his investigation, and then the meeting breaks up. You go home.
* * * * *
"Home" is a non-descript apartment on the other side of Olympia, a small one-bedroom affair in a remodeled motel on the old highway. You pull up in the old, weather-beaten van you use to drive in and out of town on your jobs for the Stellae. Of course, you're in a more publically presentable form as you dismount with a feigned weariness in your step. You're in work jeans and work boots; a smelly plaid shirt and green seed cap; a scruffy black beard and unkempt black hair. Your name is "Randal Tonnesen," and you're a long-distance trucker.
Well, that's what you tell people. You always ditch the van in Denver before catching a flight to wherever you need to go.
"Margie," you call after you open the door, and stamp your feet on the mat. "I'm home!" The water in the kitchen shuts off, and your wife peers around the corner. She's faded, like Randal; lumpy and plain and flat faced, with a prodigious bosom that sits on a fat belly and fat hips. She's changed into her "comfort" clothes--sweats and sneakers--and has her hair down. "How you been, dumpling?" you ask.
"Better for seeing you," she smiles. You embrace and kiss, and you pat her ass.
"Oh, you feel good," you say. "You're always so worried when I go, I'm afraid I'll find you wasted to nothing when I get back." You kiss her more deeply still, and she murmurs and coos in a muffled way. "You fixing something? For how many?"
"Just frozen food," she says. "I can thaw another tray for you."
"That'd be good," you say. "The rental money come in?"
"Sure nuff. You thinkin' about goin' out? Elmer's, maybe?"
"I had enough diner food on the road. Let's stay in. I'll take you out tomorrow."
Margie needs no help in the kitchen, so you slouch at the table while she finishes up. You eat together in the little nook, side by side, catching up on things. You tell her about the long-distance drive to Chattanooga--"Them roads in Arkansas just get worse and worse, I betcha"--and she tells about how her job's been going. She's a nurse at the county hospital: a low-paying affair, but without a lot of stress, for Olympia is a small town, and it's mostly accidents and small children and old folk who need caring for. The difficult cases all get sent to Laramie or Denver. Her salary isn't enough for two to live on (you earn nothing as a trucker, for you don't have such a job), so there's a supplement: that "rental money" that comes in once a month from "family property" you've told her you inherited out in Maryland. All together, it's enough to eke by on.
Clean-up means just dumping the trays into the garbage. You take the sack to the dumpster out back, then linger on the back stoop in the evening light with a cigarette. You nod across the fence at Overmeier, who lives in a house next to the complex. Back inside, you snuggle on the couch with Margie, watching TV. It comes to a premature end after you've got your arms around her. "Wanna fool around?" you ask, and nuzzle her ear.
"I thought you'd never ask."
You pull her up, and the two of you toddle back to the bedroom. She pulls off her sweat pants and sweat top, disclosing her pale, mottled, flabby body. You help her with her shoes and underthings. When she's entirely naked, and quivering, you push her gently back onto the bed and disrobe yourself. Randal is leaner, but not in great shape himself. You mount her and pump in and out. She groans with pleasure; your end is pleasant too, though it's a bit like burying yourself in pillows and sofa cushions. But she's a comfort. You keep working her even after you're spent, getting yourself hot and sweaty and flushed, until she finally cums. As she settles back, you rest a gentle hand on her forehead. Her eyelids briefly flutter, and then her breathing becomes deep and regular. You shift your hand a little, and all the memories she's accumulated in the last seven days pour into you.
You pull out of her, and lay on your side, next to her. A little bit of you dies inside as you look at her. You try so hard to believe that it's real, and often you're able to forget that it isn't. But there always comes this moment, when you have to face the fact anew: Your marriage is a sham.
You brush your hand over her face. In the infinitesimal space that separates consecutive nanoseconds there's a blur, and then it's Randal Tonnesen laying beside you.
His eyes blink open, and he look around. "How much time's passed," he asks warily.
"A week. It's the third. You were in Chattanooga. Nothing happened. You just got back this afternoon. We ate. You wanna fool around?" He looks at you askance. You fall onto your back, and your form changes, bloating and expanding. "Mm," you sigh in Margie's throaty voice. "That was good. I could go again, though."
He clambers onto you and into you, and you welcome him inside. Then you sleep, cuddling with a thing that is sometimes a fake called Randal Tonnesen, and is sometimes a fake called Margie Tonnesen. Both, of course, are constructed personas--one of them always riding around on a golem--so that you can have a quiet life of your own.
* * * * *
You spend the next week as Margie while "Randal" takes care of the house and shopping. You're at the hospital ten hours a day, caring for the sick and maimed: tiring work, but emotionally satisfying. Margie, with her quiet, tender and solicitous manner, is popular with the patients; less so with the staff, for she concentrates on her job, but she is highly respected. The smiles you get from the injured, and their gratitude, are not why you do it, of course. It's part of your penance, and part of your training, too; it's a way of meditating, and of bathing the self-inflicted wounds that, even five years later, still fester from your initial brush with the occult.
You have, in a sense, paid for your folly: the folly of apprenticing yourself to a dark magician; the folly of seizing his work after causing his death; the folly of corrupting two members of the Stellae Errantes, sending them spinning off in retrograde motion. For you are no longer human. You are a thing like the thing that sits under a special mask that is sometimes a mask of Randal Tonnesen and sometimes a mask of Margie Tonnesen. You even lost your one of your original ousiarchs--the planetary intelligences that give you and your Stellae colleagues their occult powers--in the affair that destroyed your human body. Slowly, with the help of the Stellae, you have clambered back to a semblance of normality. Your being is now intertwined with that of the Libra Personae, and you can steal and craft and assume any form or identity. Under hard tutelage you have forged a new connection, with Lurga, the ousiarch of judgment, penance, and meditation. You have fought monsters.
Mostly with pity, never with hatred, despite your chilly demeanor. For you can never shake the feeling that you yourself are now a monster, of a kind.
In this existence, hospital work is another kind of battle, though a more relaxed one. You have ample time for thought and reflection and mediation and prayer as you carefully make your rounds. And with your special touch--the same one that can send adversaries into a swoon--you can put the ill and the hurting into a painless, though temporary, sleep.
* * * * *
So a week passes in this way. All messages from Charles go through "Randal," for you keep the "Margie" persona segregated from your Stellae work; when you put her new memories into the golem and send it back out under her face, she will have no memories to suggest she is anything but a small town nurse.
So it's "Randal" who a week later gets the email, and his words to you are a study in feigned nonchalance: he's the one in this "marriage" who knows how things really are, and how they're supposed to work. "Got a funny email this morning," he says when you meet him for lunch on Thursday.
"Funny strange or funny ha ha?"
"Just funny. Eh, don't know why I mentioned it. Email from an old friend. You gonna finish your shake?"
You hand it to him, and he sucks on it thoughtfully and veers off onto a new subject. Later that evening, you switch back into his form long enough to log in. "Forwarding this to you," it says in the subject line. The sender is Will Prescott.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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